Oh, The Metahumanity! (Sept. 29)

Wed, 09/30/2015 - 11:53 — Bryan Lambert

What's this? The Summer Superhero Hiatus is over? Agents of SHIELD is back this week, Flash and Arrow are back next week, and I'm modifying my "fuck Gotham" stance into a "fuck Gotham and that horrible-looking Supergirl show with the worst Red Tornado redesign ever" stance? With Jessica Jones on the horizon? Ah, it's a good time to be a nerd.

It's almost impossible to believe that the season premiere of Agents of SHIELD is the same show, with most of the same characters, as the show that premiered a couple of years ago. This week was an hour of television that knew exactly what it was and exactly what it wanted to do, setting up the plot threads from last season's finale, introducing the new players for the season, and executing nearly everything with a level of confidence and an almost swashbuckling flair that was missing from most of the first season.

Terragen is everywhere, and Inhumans are busting out all over. SHIELD is trying to save them, the government is trying to contain them, and the mysterious Lash is trying (with a very high success rate) to kill them, for reasons as yet unknown. Meanwhile, Simmons was grabbed by the monolith, teleported to an alien world, and months of obsessive searching by Fitz leads to a thousand-year-old-scroll continaing one Hebrew word - "death". A nod to Thanos?

That and the presidential reaction to the Inhuman outbreak seems to be pointing towards even greater integration with upcoming movies - it's hard not to see this as a precursor to the "Accords" that are the likely focal point of Civil War. But the "death reference is pointing at Thanos, that's a ballsy, ballsy move three years before Infinity War.

Also at play is the shadowy government agent Rosalind Price, who is involved with the government's totally-not-S.W.O.R.D. alien task force and seems to be directing American policy in regards to Inhumans. She's Coulson's new foil, and the episode has fun establishing that they're evenly matched through traditional one-upsmanship shenanigans.

It remains to be seen whether the Inhuman who SHIELD extracts and tries to help this episode will end up being one of Daisy's Secret Warriors or not. Similarly Lincoln, the electric Inhuman from last season, who's all bitter now and stuff.

The only real off note for me was Bobbi - I think her acting and character are lagging behind the rest of the team in terms of development. She seems like someone from the first season - undefined and not sure of herself. I mean, she's a biologist because her knee's hurt and she can also do tech stuff good enough to cover for Fitz? That's a lot of extra stuff to hang on a character who's an ass-kicking mercenary spy at the core. But now that Daisy's an ass-kicking spy with superpowers, Bobbi seems like the second-best person on the team at three or four things now, when she should be the best at something.

Next week, we pick up the Ward's Rebuilding hydra thread, and hopefully find out where May is.